Meet your Ghost Guide outside Richbrau Brewing Company, to depart on your tour of Historic Shockoe Bottom. The tour will include tales outside a number of local landmarks.
From outside the Poe Museum, travelers will see the Old Stone House, Richmond’s oldest standing residence. Although Edgar Allan Poe never lived in the building, the museum preserves and interprets his Richmond legacy. Your guide will share the site’s history and the eerie stories associated with it. This tour remains outdoors and does not include museum admission or interior access.
Pause outside Masons’ Hall, built between 1785 and 1787 and recognized as the nation’s oldest building constructed for Masonic purposes and continuously used for them. Your guide will discuss the hall’s place in early Richmond history, its Masonic associations, and the eerie stories connected with the property. This is an exterior stop; the tour does not enter the building.
Pause outside one of Richmond’s oldest surviving houses, built in the late 1780s for prominent court clerk Adam Craig. Your guide will discuss the property’s early Richmond history, its connections to Edgar Allan Poe through Craig’s daughter Jane Stith Stanard, and the eerie stories associated with the house. This is an exterior stop; the tour does not enter the building.
Pause outside the historic building now occupied by Shockoe Artspace. Originally used as a tobacco warehouse, the building was later repurposed as a military hospital during the Civil War. Your guide will discuss its place in Shockoe Bottom’s commercial and wartime history, along with the eerie stories associated with the property. This is an exterior stop; the tour does not enter the gallery.
Pause near Main Street Station, a landmark of Richmond’s long railroad history. Your guide will share eerie stories tied to the city’s railroad legacy and the surrounding area. This is an exterior stop; the tour does not enter the station.
Pause at the historic 17th Street Market, one of America’s oldest public marketplaces and a center of commerce and community in Shockoe Bottom for centuries. Your guide will share stories from the market’s long and sometimes eerie past, along with the history of the surrounding neighborhood. This is an outdoor public space.
Great tour with a very knowledgeable guide who knew many stories first hand. There is really not much walking so it was very easy. The stories are interesting and mix history and ghost sightings. Overall, a nice experience and easy way to discover hidden secrets of the city.
I had an amazing time, and I am super happy with my tour guide, Jenny, an extemely knowledge paranormal historian, an intriguing storyteller, and a kind person. I could not recommend this tour more!!
The tour was literally a block that showed like 4 locations at which the tour guide talked for half an hour about nothing. The ghost stories where all speculation and she talked more about history which was fine but it was not what we came for.
Our guide, Carli, was amazing. Very knowledgeable and the family loved it
We would have appreciated more historicity to the tour, rather than what seemed to be off-the-cuff hearsay. Establishing known true events, reinforced with supporting documentation, such as newspaper clippings or history book excerpts, would have added quite a bit to the experience, and lent credence to the potential for supernatural. Instead, even the non-supernatural events seemed unmoored from reality, and that undermined the potential for spookiness.
Valerie was awesome. We really enjoyed her presentation. Lots of history, lots of great stories. We also appreciated the fact that the stories have all been verified.
Such an amazing and fun tour! I’ve lived in Richmond my whole life and still learned so much! We really enjoyed our Shadows of Shockoe tour. The stories and history of the area was so fascinating. I learned so much from our knowledgeable tour guide Valerie! She did an awesome job, highly recommend!
I had a lovely time learning more about the history of the area and the different types of spooks that linger. Chris was a great guide and took questions in stride and included tibits on points that I was interested in. I would definitely recommend this to others!
Valerie was a fantastic tour guide. We had a great tour despite the weather!
Val was our tour guide and she was awesome and so informative. It was rainy and a little cold but it was still so much fun.
It was a fantastic experience! Valarie did an amazing job! Very detailed oriented regarding the historical aspects of Richmond with the tour and general questions.
We went during a Bachelorette trip, and Valerie was great. It was rainy, but she still came out and showed us a great time. It was a fun time learning about the history of Richmond.
I was so excited to go on this tour with my family and felt like there was great potential for storytelling . Shockoe bottom has a rich history. My family and I were sadly disappointed with the tour guide. She was very nice and animated but the stories were all disjointed and she kept laughing at her own jokes. Unfortunately we were bored and ready to leave after 1 hour and 45 minutes. I would not recommend this particular tour guide to my friends or family.
Had a lot of fun on girls night tonight with Martha. She did phenomenal and kept us entertained. Would recommend for another girls night. Look forward to more tours with this company and team
Introduction was great. Area is fabulous and held so much potential. Tiffany is a very nice person but her story telling was off tonight. My family was bored after the second stop. We kept hoping the next stop would be better, but it wasn’t. I’d consider another tour but with a different host. Maybe.
Our tour guide was a little boring and her stories didn’t flow well. The history part of the tour was a little interesting but the ghost stories need to be better developed.
Super friendly tour guide, she stayed on pace with the group and cracked some funny jokes as well!! I loved her story-telling and her sound affects!!
The guide was very engaging and did a great job of revealing the history of the neighborhood. The stories were enjoyable and even my skeptical wife was able to enjoy the experience. Highly recommend for anyone wanting to learn more about the area with a ghostly twist.
Not in a great neighborhood. Guide was friendly, but the script was quite poor. You do not enter any of the buildings and most are viewed from far away. We left in the final 15 minutes to go to a restaurant along the way.
Very knowledgeable tour guide and length of tour was good. Learned a lot about local history and lore.
Great evening of haunted tales and history! Jenny was an excellent guide. Highly recommend this tour.
Very interesting and fun tour. We had a group of 10, so we did a private tour. Leader was knowledgeable, engaging, and personable. The tour is as much about Richmond history as ghosts. Enjoyed walking through "the Slip"!
I was so excited to take this tour. I've been wanting to go since moving to Richmond a few years ago. However, while the tour guide was nice, the tour which has SO much promise. The guide's delivery was not unlike a book report. It lacked vigor, personal story, natural humor. It was rich in "um's." Sadly, the tour guide was guilty of one of the sin's of leading tours: telling people what the tour used to offer that was better than present (e.g. starting within the grounds of the Poe Museum complex). I would absolutely go on another tour with this company and would likely enjoy getting to know the tour guide as a friend, but as an experience, I was underwhelmed by the delivery and found myself looking at my watch.
Martha blended historical fact and supernatural speculation into an incredible evening! if you’re interested in the history of richmond and/or some juicy ghost stories you cannot spend a better night.
Awesome ghost tour. She was very informative. They kept me in contact. Really good and answered all my questions very fast
We had a great time on our tour of Shockoe Bottom. Our guide, Zoe, was fantastic. She truly loved the stories she shared and drew you into the lore and history. Would highly recommend to locals and visitors!
We enjoyed this tour! The guide provided interesting history in a fun manor. Definitely recommend choosing this tour!
We had a company outing for a ghost tour/pub crawl and it was so fun! The guides were knowledgeable, great storytellers, and really nice too.
I went on the tour with five friends. Our guide, Zoe, was amazing. She was engaging and fun. We had a fabulous time and learned a lot about the history of Richmond. I highly recommend this tour.
Fantastic tour. Our guides Beth & Chris wove compelling stories around the sites we visited in the historic area. They were easy to understand and the narrative flowed seamlessly from site to site. Our group included both families and older couples. Everyone seemed to enjoy it equally. Definitely a top recommendation in Richmond.
If you're in to Poe conspiracy theories, ask for Olivia!!! She was a treasure trove of interesting information! My 9yo was so engaged and you should of heard the questions he was asking!!! So deep!! She blew his little mind!! We had perfect weather for it, too, which was the cherry on top! We had dinner just around the corner at the Proper Pie beforehand, which made for a really great family evening!!! Would highly recommend!!! Just FYI, there's no sign at the meet up location. We met them in front of Richbrau Brewery. If you go the the bottom of the hill on 20th St, there's a fenced-in lot for the Holocaust Museum that you can park in!! Hope you see some ghosts!!! 😅🤣😅🤩
The FreeMason building was amazing to see. I absolutely loved learning about Edgar Allen Poe. The beautiful house the corporate man owns was nice.
Enjoyed our tour by Beth. Very informative about parts of Shockoe history. Interesting info about some resident ghosts. Wished we could have seen the tunnel up close but skies were getting dark.
Wow, that tunnel was enough to convince me! This was a great experience, and mine being a bit more exclusive than most, I had both Chris and Beth to guide our merry band of miscreants about the Shockoe Bottom, filled with some wonderful architecture, incredible history, and more spooks than you can shake a dowsing rod at, some of these locations were really creepy and the Poe Museum was the perfect night cap! Take this walk and understand there is no haunt without the history. Another top flight local experience you simply cannot get anywhere else!
I'm a professor of history from Pittsburgh and have gone through several of these tours My sole problem is that the stops were too long. This meant that the stories went on forever. The best solution is to have more stops with shorter descriptions at each. Our guide, a young looking woman, was losing her audience not from lack of ability, but the length of each stop.
It pains me to say it because the guide was amazing and clearly passionate about the topic. But we stood mostly at a large distance away from the sites and it was stories that people told them. Or... stories that people didn’t tell them...? If you know, you know. We didn’t even finish the tour, but snuck off to walk back to the hotel. It doesn’t help that the area is apparently a party district. So, a lot of people cutting thru and trying to listen over music being pumped thru various vehicles. Takes away all the “magic”.
The tour and stories are good. Mac was a great storyteller. He was very into it and as a local he had first hand experience with the locations. The area just isn’t suited for a walking tour and especially not a tour at night. There is a lot of street traffic, a lot of noise, a lot of drunken bar goers passing through. The website said the tour would last about 75 minutes but ours was 90 minutes.
This is about an 1 and 15 minute tour. Our tour guide Mac was very knowledgeable and had some great haunted stories to share. Our stops included the Poe Museum, Shockoe art space, underground tunnel (not in it but above and around where it was dug), Mason’s hall, and train station. Some stories definitely gave you the chills. My favorite stories were about the tunnel. My husband liked the stories by Mason’s Hall. Every tour guide will have different stories to tell, but overall it was decent.
My teenagers begged us to take this tour so that they could learn history in a different way. I'm not sure what I was expecting but this tour was just okay for me. My kids enjoyed it. At one point during the tour, they have you sit on a wall to tell stories of the railroad. It probably would have had more impact if a train wasn't rolling thru making it near impossible to hear. I may be naive but I thought most trains run on a schedule which would mean that this tour is interrupted regularly. It was a nice evening walk thru Shockoe. If you view this tour as simply entertainment, you would probably like it. If you expect it to be rich in history, then I would suggest that you pick a different venue.
Monday through Friday 9 am to 7 pm EST
Reach us by phone
Reach us by email